1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to active safety applications and real-time vehicle tracking systems, and more particularly to an improved system for determining a host vehicle congruent path divergence relative to at least one traveling remote vehicle.
2. Background Art
It has long been desirous to facilitate the tracking of an arrear vehicle in various situations, for example, such as night-time, guidance, safety, or convoy scenarios. Active safety applications and tracking systems have been developed to help monitor traffic motion among transportation machines, such as boats, automobiles, and aircrafts. These conventional applications and systems typically rely upon the ability to determine the accurate relative positioning, and predictable driving trajectories of host and surrounding vehicles to provide vehicle positioning/tracking. To accomplish these tasks, current state of the art approaches use inputs from a variety of external vehicle sensors that detect surrounding vehicles, and calculate their relative range, range rate of change, and heading. These sensor inputs are then utilized by a controller to determine a projected path, or to alert the host or remote vehicle of a pre-determined event.
Though commonly used, these multi-sensor based systems present general concerns and inefficiencies. For example, to provide three-hundred-and-sixty degree detection numerous sensors are required, which significantly increase the total product and repair costs of the host vehicle. The numerous sensors are unreliable due to the extra complexity involved in interpreting and fusing sensory inputs in the final decision making algorithms. Further, the complexity of these conventional systems increases labor costs associated with training, manufacture, and design.
These systems are also limited operationally due to inflexible vehicle-specific configurations. Of primary concern, these systems are limited by the capabilities of the sensors. Additionally, proper sensory performance is also affected by increasingly complex and over-burdened vehicle communication networks. In this configuration, each separately performing sensor that presents an electrical control unit utilizes available bandwidth for inter-nodal communication, such that the more sensors utilized, the greater the necessary bandwidth and processing capability. Where baud rates or capacity becomes insufficient, backlogging of sensory inputs may cause poor performance or the failure of the conventional system.
In the mean time, Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication systems have been developed for relaying in-vehicle data to other V2V equipped vehicles within the operating range of the communication system. These V2V systems typically employ one of several conventional short-range communication technologies such as Radio Frequency (RF), or a short-range local radio network, to deliver their messages. Though often interconnected within the intra-vehicle communication network, which includes the active safety application, and typically providing greater than sensory range, conventional V2V communication systems have not been adapted for use by preventative tracking solutions. Instead, V2V functionality is frustrated, in this regard, where a misguided arrear vehicle veers from the desirous path and falls out of sensory tracking range.